Many boomers are awash in nostalgia over the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. They’ll reminisce about how a massive weekend gathering fueled by sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll in an upstate New York cow pasture became a generational group hug that, against all odds, offered a respite from a decade of turbulence. Never mind the fact that this touchstone of the 1960s counterculture movement is now a commercial bonanza for corporations cashing in with a blizzard of books, reissued music, films and other memorabilia. For those who came of age in that decade, Woodstock is their shining moment.

But for me and most other African Americans of that generation, the anniversary will be met with a collective shrug, if it is even noticed at all. That was about the same reaction that the big hippie music festival got in 1969 and when various other anniversaries and restagings have cropped up. It’s not that Woodstock didn’t have an impact—the potential market represented by hundreds of thousands of people willing to peacefully slop around in mud wasn’t lost on Madison Avenue or the music industry, and its far-reaching effects in that regard are still felt today. Woodstock was also an epiphany for a generation of youth who would soon trade in their tie-dye for ties and suits.

For us as African Americans, the music-fueled love-in was no such cultural watershed. We weren’t exactly feeling groovy in 1969. Hippies sought freedom from social norms. African Americans sought freedom from social injustice. One year after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the subsequent riots and burnings, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius wasn’t happening in the devastated inner cities and poor rural communities. The coalition that had successfully pushed for civil rights for more than a decade was beginning to splinter and there was no clear direction forward.

At the same time, advocates girded for the inevitable backlash that threatened to stunt or erode the hard-earned gains toward equality. The peace and harmony that broke out at Woodstock barely registered in neighborhoods beset with poverty, drugs and crime and bereft of basic services.

A wariness existed of newly elected President Richard Nixon, who had wooed Southern conservatives with promises that he would protect states’ rights, which some took as code for tepid federal support of civil rights and desegregation laws. While the most obvious Jim Crow practices had been legally struck down, African Americans still had a long way to go in the fight for equality in employment, wages, education, housing and politics. With no singular figure like King to focus on, media attention shifted away from civil rights as the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, women’s liberation and other issues commanded attention.

Musically, Woodstock was rife with iconic and career-making performances by the likes of the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Santana, Joan Baez, the Band, Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, and Blood, Sweat and Tears.

But in 1969, those acts had little direct impact on the artistic direction that soul music would take at that time. Two Woodstock acts that did—Jimi Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone—were already infusing classic soul with the psychedelic sounds of the counterculture movement well before Woodstock. They inspired sociopolitical music from Temptations producer Norman Whitfield, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, George Clinton and others that gave voice to the anger, fear, hope and defiance African Americans felt at the time. James Brown was at the peak of his power as well, masterminding the funk revolution that was to come. Stevie Wonder had just reached adulthood and was beginning to scratch the surface of his genius. Besides, that November, the Jackson 5 arrived—a true watershed moment.

So while many African Americans won’t have warm, fuzzy feelings about Woodstock, they can look back at 1969 as a pivotal time, one that marked the beginning of another stretch of enormous social change, political strides and cultural evolution. But almost none of what has occurred in the 40 years since then can be traced back to that mythical, stoned-out weekend on a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y.

Steve Jones is a music critic at USA Today.